Panel: Cinematic Adaptations of Life Writing Genres
Copanelists: Glenn D’Cruz and Thomas R. Smith
“I can speak,” declares a stuttering young man during a hypnotic séance in the opening scene of Andrey Tarkosky’s autobiographical film Mirror (1975). What lies ahead of the film’s protagonist is the difficult task of facilitating communication, reciprocation, and reconciliation between various realms of experience: past, present, and future; personal and public; historical and artistic. The current version of the film illustrates Tarkovsky’s premise of “imprinted time”—multiple modalities of an individual’s life come together in a single cinematic work, creating one’s “lump of time.” But in Mirror, the protagonist finds himself in a very peculiar temporal sphere where each experience is a distorted or translated version of another; for instance, the same actress plays the protagonist’s mother and wife, and the issues that arise between the narrator and these women are strikingly similar. In what seems to be a deeply autobiographical film, Tarkovsky does not simply juxtapose, but creates mirror images of personal, national, and human histories.
While this paper deals with the various acts of translation as they are thematically present in Tarkovsky’s Mirror, it also aims to investigate the evolution of the film—the translation of the original idea to create a stylized documentary about oneself into a well-crafted cinematic work in its current form. A few important questions will be raised with respect to this translation on the compositional level. What encouraged Tarkovsky to move from the simple documentary interviews with his mother to the fluid cinematic composition consisting of various types of footage, including newsreels? Whey does he choose to create multiple reflections between personal and collective experiences? To what extent do they validate and amplify each other? These inquiries should help us gain insight not only into Tarkovsky’s work, but also into the construction of autobiographical experiences in this artistic medium and the role of translation in this process.
Olga Aksakalova is a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. She is completing her dissertation research on the representation of history in American autobiography of the 1950s. Her interests include twentieth century literature, film, and memory narratives.